Walls are meant to protect, to keep people in or out, to maintain privacy. Walls have no place in small business. Think of a large room with no walls, no dividers, no privacy. That’s the new small business space.
Here’s why your office needs no walls:
1. Training: Most small companies have limited resources when it comes to the ability to train. In order to grow training, your new, young or inexperienced team members are essential. Place these folks right next to experienced people in your company. Remember, no private offices. Training then becomes insidious. It’s part of the daily routine. Learn by listening, for both the trainer/mentor and the newbie.
2. Communication: Even large companies could improve communication. There’s nothing like hearing your team and knowing every essential detail about the business by not letting a private office separate communications. Real teams have nothing to hide. Think special forces. Small units that are highly specialized and completely on the same page.
3. Water cooler. Open spaces remove the “water cooler effect.” Whereby newsworthy information or office gossip is now part of the team talk, not a select few around the water cooler. Nothing breaks down the small business team more than fear, uncertainty and doubt. When your team removes negative talk and faces real situations together, situations are resolved as one. People can thrive without fear.
These are a few of the principles I’ve applied to our business at BrainSell. Years of more traditional experience proved to me that private offices are obstacles to growth.
Apple has inspired a lot of people lately. Their much hyped release of the iPad has made many people rethink the way they do business. One of those people is Mike Ladd, President & CEO of Euchner-USA.
SalesLogix account details on the iPad
Euchner makes safety switches and automation systems for a variety of industries. Ladd’s salespeople are constantly traveling, so entering notes in a CRM system is imperative to track all of those on site visits. Ladd understands the value of CRM, and he has been disappointed with user adoption. He hopes to change all of that with SalesLogix Web on the iPad.
“There is a tremendous amount of good information in SalesLogix,” said Ladd. However, Euchner has been using SalesLogix LAN version. His salespeople are less inclined to use CRM on the road since SalesLogix can only be accessed through a cumbersome laptop.
“Their notes aren’t good because they save them up for the end of the week,” said Ladd. “They take notes on the back of a business card and then try to replicate them in SalesLogix. A lot gets left out.”
Those days will soon be over. SalesLogix has a few different deployment options now; SAAS, Web and LAN. Euchner is deploying SalesLogix Web in a few weeks. Their LAN instance will now be accessible through a unique URL.
Ladd has had an iPad for a while now and he’s convinced that SalesLogix on the iPad will encourage his sales team to take notes when they’re on site. Ladd expects SalesLogix on the iPad will generate better reporting, streamline the sales process better and save a tremendous amount of time.
“The value of SalesLogix is built for this,” said Ladd about the iPad. “My sales people can look at history notes in SalesLogix and they’ll be better prepared. The iPad is fun to use, and if it’s fun, people will use it more.”
Salesforce.com and SalesLogix by Sage Software are two popular Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. They serve the same general purpose: software that helps companies track customer/employee interactions, lead management, planning, calendar capabilities and much more.
Salesforce.com has been in existence for 10 years and is only offered as a software as a service (SaaS), i.e as a subscription model. SalesLogix has been around for 14 years and was previously install only. However, in 2010 Sage released SalesLogix Cloud. Customers can now choose to deploy SalesLogix on the web, SaaS (Cloud), mobile, and LAN (installed).
There are similarities in both Salesforce and SalesLogix. But also some significant differences. Such as functionality and data storage.
Yesterday, the Senate voted down amendments to strip out IRS reporting requirement in the new health care law.
While both Republicans and Democrats agree that a new tax reporting requirement in the health care law should be scaled back, each party defeated the other side’s proposal to accomplish that goal.
Senators just voted 46-52 against an amendment by Sen. Mike Johanns, R-Neb. that would have stripped out the provision, which requires businesses to report to the IRS transactions to anyone or any company that cost more than $600.
The Senate then defeated a similar amendment by Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla. Nelson’s measure, which went down in a 61-37 vote, would have raised the reporting requirement to $5,000 and excluded businesses with fewer than 25 employees.
Seven Democrats voted for the Johanns proposal, which most Democrats and the Obama administration said went too far in rolling back a health care provision that was expected to raise about $17 billion to help pay for an expansion in health care coverage. Republicans for the most part refused to back the Democratic bill because they didn’t think it went far enough and did not like that it would be paid for with a $15 billion tax on oil companies.
The amendments were part of a small business tax bill the Senate is expected to vote on in the coming days. Unless the two parties can agree on a compromise, the tax reporting requirement that nobody seems to like is going to remain in the bill. The reporting requirements are set to begin in 2012
The Senate is reconsidering their harsh 1099 legislation with a vote tomorrow. Here’s a run down of what might change.
The Senate will vote Sept. 14 on giving small businesses relief from a new paperwork burden imposed by health care reform.
That law requires businesses, beginning in 2012, to file 1099 reports with the IRS any time it spends more than $600 a year with another business on goods and services. The provision was included as a way to help pay for health care reform – the theory is that third-party reporting of sales will make businesses less likely to hide income from the IRS.
Businesses currently have to file 1099 forms only for services supplied by unincorporated contractors. Health care reform’s significant expansion of the 1099 requirement has prompted howls of protest from small businesses, who fear they will be swamped by the additional paperwork.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has scheduled votes on Sept. 14 on two amendments to the Small Business Jobs Act that would address the 1099 requirement in different ways.
An amendment by Sen. Mike Johanns, R-Neb., would repeal the requirement.
A competing amendment by Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., would exempt businesses with fewer than 25 employees from the requirement and would raise the dollar threshold for reporting purchases from $600 to $5,000. Nelson’s amendment also would exempt credit card purchases from the 1099 requirement, something the Treasury Department already was planning to do.
Nelson’s amendment isn’t good enough for the National Federation of Independent Businesses.
“We don’t need an alternative,” said Susan Eckerly, senior vice president of the NFIB. “We need full repeal.”
BrainSell has recently started using Pardot, a marketing automation and lead management tool. One of the coolest things is the simplest feature; lead tracking by reverse DNS look up. A cookie tracks a visitor’s every move on your site. If they fill out a form, you can track them by name. It’s a little creepy, but it’s a great tool. Before you call the prospect, you know exactly which pages they’ve visited and and for how long. You’re one step ahead.
But some companies are taking this to the next level. A New York company, Lotame Solutions, can profile Internet users by inspecting their participation on various social media outlets. Once people are profiled, they are sold for as little as a tenth of a cent. This kind of business is booming, it’s one of the fastest growing in fact.
Julia Angwin of the Wall St. Journal explains it well.
“Ms. Hayes-Beaty is being monitored by Lotame Solutions Inc., a New York company that uses sophisticated software called a “beacon” to capture what people are typing on a website—their comments on movies, say, or their interest in parenting and pregnancy. Lotame packages that data into profiles about individuals, without determining a person’s name, and sells the profiles to companies seeking customers. Ms. Hayes-Beaty’s tastes can be sold wholesale (a batch of movie lovers is $1 per thousand) or customized (26-year-old Southern fans of “50 First Dates”).”
Creepy, right?
Would buy leads that way? How much value do they hold?
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